Capturing history: Palmer High student creates a documentary telling the story of the Northern Knights FRC robotics team

Carter Fickes has no problem staying busy.  

The Palmer High School junior is an International Baccalaureate student, a member of the Northern Knights FRC robotics team and has his own photography business. 

Now he can add documentary filmmaker to the list.  

Fickes filmed, directed, edited, produced and released “3,100 Miles to Victory,” a movie that follows the Northern Knights during their historic journey from Alaska to Minnesota to compete in the First Robotics Competition regional championship last spring. The program is hosting a special showing of the film Saturday at 4 p.m. in the Colony High School theatre. 

Fickes is the business manager for the Northern Knights, a robotics team based at Colony High School. He maintains the team’s website and social media, and pursues sponsorships and grants to help fund the team’s efforts. He said it’s the program and his teammates that sparked the idea for a potential film. 

“Our robotics team, our story was really my inspiration,” he said. “I do a lot of media. My job on our team is to (tell) our story. I thought I might as well portray it in a movie-like fashion to actually tell the story so that the common person watching it would kind of get the whole idea and the scope of the actual mission to do this.” 

The Northern Knights were a rookie team from Alaska participating in a massive competition. Members of the team packed an 85-pound robot they built themselves into a wooden crate and brought it to Minnesota.  

Armed with his Canon Rebel T3i 600D, Fickes started capturing footage as his team prepared for the trip and continued throughout the journey.  

“I knew going into the trip I was going to put something together, What that was, was still up in the air,” Fickes said. 

Fickes has made short videos before. This could have been 10 or 20 minutes, he said. But the end result is a 1 hour, 3 minute documentary.  

“I knew what I wanted to do was capture the footage, capture the story, whether we won or not,” Fickes said. “We’re the only team from Alaska. I want to tell our story to inspire younger kids in other levels of robotics.” 

Fickes said, regardless of how the Northern Knights did in the competition, there was a story to be told.  

“I knew going into it, we were the underdogs,” Fickes said. “Our mindset going to Minnesota was to try our best, meet other teams and make relationships so that whether we win or not, we can have connections.” 

The Northern Knights exceeded any expectation they could have dreamed of. The Knights became the first FRC (First Robotics Competition) team from the 49th state to win a regional championship. Robots were built by teams to gather and shoot foam balls at targets on the event stage. Teams used offensive and defensive strategies and formed alliances with other programs, as they worked through the qualifying and later rounds. 

And “3,100 Miles to Victory,” takes viewers on the entire ride. 

“You see all the struggles, all the problems we had to go through to get there,” Fickes said.  

Fickes did all of the work on the documentary himself. He has no formal training and is completely self-taught. 

“Watching YouTube videos and just learning on the fly,” he said.  

In total, Fickes estimates he shot between 150 and 200 hours of footage. He has more than 65 gigabytes of film footage. That doesn’t count music and sound effects.  

Most of the gear he used is his own, including his camera, lenses and microphones. He was able to borrow lighting and sound equipment from Colony High’s multimedia department for the staged interviews in the film. 

He used CapCut Pro to edit and put together his film. That process took months. He started organizing and editing footage the day he started shooting. After that, a lot of his free time was devoted to working on the film. He even downloaded a version so he could work offline during a family trip to Valdez over the summer. 

“I was doing it piece-by-piece, chunk-by-chunk,” he said.  

Late in the process he showed rough cuts to family members to get some feedback.  

Fickes finished his final cut about a month ago, but continued to make minor tweaks until the night before the film was live online. The movie has been on YouTube for about two weeks, and had more than 600 views as of Aug. 19.  

Fickes will have a chance to see his film alongside his teammates and an audience of guests on Saturday.  

He said he wants to continue making films. He’s just not sure when he will be ready for his next project. Fickes said he has plenty of footage from his team's trip to worlds in Houston in late April. The Northern Knights earned that opportunity by winning regionals.  

Fickes stays very active in still photography. He has his own business — CF Photography. His aunt got him interested and his grandparents bought him his own camera three years ago. Since then, he’s branched out in several areas and has photographed weddings, events, senior portraits and high school athletics.  

As an IB student at PHS, Fickes is taking courses such as history, philosophy and chemistry. He said he also loves literature, creative writing and foreign languages. He is semi-fluent in Spanish and can also speak some French.  

Fickes said he hopes photography is a big part of his future and is considering career fields like marketing or journalism.  

Fickes got into robotics while he was a middle school student at Academy Charter School. Prior to his freshman year at PHS, Fickes was invited to check out the robotics program at Colony High. He wanted to be involved and joined the club. The team is not made up of strictly Colony High students. There is Fickes and another student from Mat-Su Career and Technical High School. CHS is the team’s home base. Fickes said he does not necessarily work much with the robot itself. Team members have their primary roles, whether it be building the robot, writing the code or operating the robot.  

“I work with other aspects that contribute to the robot,” he said. “My job is to make people interested.” 

That’s where the work with the website and social media, and pursuing sponsorships and grants comes into play. For more about the team, see sites.google.com/view/northernknightsrobotics/home. 

Watch the film at www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMRQGN1-FwU&t=872s. 

Jeremiah Bartz is the Community Relations Coordinator for the Mat-Su Borough School District.